Note 8 — Chapter IX · The Journey Southward

On Friday, June 12th, we started again at 4 A.M. with sails on our sledges. There had been frost, so the snow was in much better condition again. It had been very windy in the night, too, so we hoped for a good day. On the preceding day it had cleared up so that we could at last see distinctly the lands around. We now discovered that we must steer in a more westerly direction than we had done during the preceding days, in order to reach the south point of the land to the west. The lands to the east disappeared eastward, so we had said good-bye to them the day before. We now saw, too, that there was a broad sound in the land to the west,8 and that it was not one entire land, as we had taken it to be. The land north of this sound was now so far away that I could only just see it. In the meantime the wind had dropped a good deal; the ice, too, became more and more uneven—it was evident that we had come to the drift-ice, and it was much harder work than we had expected. We could see by the air that there must be open water to the south, and as we went on we heard, to our joy, the sound of breakers. At 6 A.M. we stopped to rest a little, and on going up on to a hummock to take a longitude observation I saw the water not far off. From a higher piece of glacier-ice we could see it better. It extended towards the promontory to the southwest. Even though the wind had become a little westerly now, we still hoped to be able to sail along the edge of the ice, and determined to go to the water by the shortest way. We were quickly at the edge of the ice, and once more saw the blue water spread out before us. We soon had our kayaks lashed together and the sail up, and put to sea. Nor were our hopes disappointed; we sailed well all day long. At times the wind was so strong that we cut through the water, and the waves washed unpleasantly over our kayaks; but we got on, and we had to put up with being a little wet. We soon passed the point we had been making for,9 and here we saw that the land ran westward, that the edge of the unbroken shore-ice extended in the same direction, and that we had water in front of us. In good spirits, we sailed westward along the margin of the ice. So we were at last at the south of the land in which we had been wandering for so long, and where we had spent a long winter. It struck me more than ever that, in spite of everything, this south coast would agree well with Leigh Smith’s map of Franz Josef Land and the country surrounding their winter quarters; but then I remembered Payer’s map and dismissed the thought.